The Lebanese ambassador to France, Rami Adwan, is the subject of complaints filed by two young women in Paris for rape and intentional violence, reports the Mediapart site on Friday. The diplomat escapes until then from French justice, an ambassador cannot be arrested, detained or prosecuted before the jurisdiction of the country in which he officiates, unless the State of origin decides to lift his immunity, according to the regulatory texts arising of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
According to Mediapart, the two women had an intimate relationship with the ambassador, who has been in post in Paris since 2017. The latter, if he does not deny the relationship with the two accusers, “contests any accusation of verbal, moral aggression and sexual” and denounces in particular “accusations that make no sense”.
One of the women accuses Rami Adwan of hitting her on the head with a marble paperweight and raping her. The other accuses him of having tried to run her over in the car and of having suffocated her in his mattress. Charges that the diplomat denies en bloc several times in the Mediapart article.
The first accuser filed a complaint in 2022, on facts dating back to the summer of 2020. At the time, she wanted to file a handrail with the police, which is however prohibited in France for acts of domestic violence, and refused to file a formal complaint. She then changed her mind, two years later. The complaint of the second accuser dates from February 2023.
Friday morning, information circulating in the Lebanese media reported an “arrest” of the ambassador, for facts which had not been specified. Contacted by L’Orient-Le Jour in the morning, Mr. Adwan had denied this information. Recontacted in the evening, the ambassador did not wish to comment on the Mediapart article.
The French media still refers to articles that appeared in the Lebanese press, in particular in al-Akhbar, in the early 2010s, according to which the ambassador had already been the subject of at least one report for sexual assault, when he was in post as a diplomat in The Hague in the Netherlands.
The Lebanese ambassador to France, Rami Adwan, is the subject of complaints filed by two young women in Paris for rape and intentional violence, reports the Mediapart site on Friday. The diplomat escapes until then from French justice, an ambassador cannot be arrested, detained or prosecuted before the jurisdiction of the country in which he officiates, unless the State of origin…
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